The Man Who Would Be King

by Rudyard Kipling

‘Sea’s going down fast,’ said the Steam.

  ‘Good business,’ said the high-pressure cylinder. ‘Whack her up, boys. They’ve given us five pounds more steam’; and he began humming the first bars of ‘Said the young Obadiah to the old Obadiah’, which, as you may have noticed, is a pet tune among engines not built for high speed. Racing-liners with twin-screws sing ‘The Turkish Patrol’ and the overture to ‘The Bronze Horse’, and ‘Madame Angot’, till something goes wrong, and then they render Gounod’s ‘Funeral March of a Marionette’, with variations.

  ‘You’ll learn a song of your own some fine day,’ said the Steam, as he flew up the fog-horn for one last bellow.

  Next day the sky cleared and the sea dropped a little, and the Dimbula began to roll from side to side till every inch of iron in her was sick and giddy. But luckily they did not all feel ill at the same time: otherwise she would have opened out like a wet paper box.

  The Steam whistled warnings as he went about his business. It is in this short, quick roll and tumble that follows a heavy sea that most of the accidents happen, for then everything thinks that the worst is over and goes off guard. So he orated and chattered till the beams and frames and floors and stringers and the rest had learned how to lock down and lock up on one another, and endure this new kind of strain.

  They found ample time to practise, for they were sixteen days at sea, and it was foul weather till within a hundred miles of New York. The Dimbula picked up her pilot, and came in covered with salt and red rust. Her funnel was dirty grey from top to bottom; two boats had been carried away; three copper ventilators looked like hats after a fight with the police; the bridge had a dimple in the middle of it; the house that covered the steam steering-gear was split as with hatchets; there was a bill for small repairs in the engine-room almost as long as the screw-shaft; the forward cargo-hatch fell into bucket-staves when they raised the iron cross-bars; and the steam-capstan had been badly wrenched on its bed. Altogether, as the skipper said, it was ‘a pretty general average’.

  ‘But she’s soupled,’ he said to Mr Buchanan. ‘For all her dead weight she rode like a yacht. Ye mind that last blow off the Banks? I am proud of her, Buck.’

  ‘It’s vara good,’ said the chief engineer, looking along the dishevelled decks. ‘Now a man judgin’ superfeecially would say we were a wreck, but we know otherwise – by experience.’

  Naturally everything in the Dimbula fairly stiffened with pride, and the foremast and the forward collision-bulkhead, who are pushing creatures, begged the Steam to warn the Port of New York of their arrival. ‘Tell those big boats all about us,’ they said. ‘They seem to take us quite as a matter of course.’

  It was a glorious, clear, dead calm morning, and in single file, with less than half a mile between each, their bands playing and their tug-boats shouting and waving handkerchiefs, were the Majestic, the Paris, the Touraine, the Servia, the Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the Werkendam, all statelily going out to sea. As the Dimbula shifted her helm to give the great boats clear way, the Steam (who knows far too much to mind making an exhibition of himself now and then) shouted: –

  ‘Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! Princes, Dukes, and Barons of the High Seas! Know ye by these presents, we are the Dimbula, fifteen days nine hours from Liverpool, having crossed the Atlantic with three thousand ton of cargo for the first time in our career! We have not foundered. We are here. ’Eer! ’Eer! We are not disabled. But we have had a time wholly unparalleled in the annals of shipbuilding! Our decks were swept! We pitched; we rolled! We thought we were going to die! Hi! Hi! But we didn’t. We wish to give notice that we have come to New York all the way across the Atlantic, through the worst weather in the world; and we are the Dimbula! We are–arr–ha–ha–ha-r-r-r!’

  The beautiful line of boats swept by as steadily as the procession of the Seasons. The Dimbula heard the Majestic say, ‘Hmph!’ and the Paris grunted, ‘How!’ and the Touraine said, ‘Oui!’ with a little coquettish flicker of steam; and the Servia said, ‘Haw!’ and the Kaiser and the Werkendam said, ‘Hoch!’ Dutch-fashion – and that was absolutely all.

  ‘I did my best,’ said the Steam gravely, ‘but I don’t think they were much impressed with us, somehow. Do you?’

  ‘It’s simply disgusting,’ said the bow-plates. ‘They might have seen what we’ve been through. There isn’t a ship on the sea that has suffered as we have – is there, now?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t go so far as that,’ said the Steam, ‘because I’ve worked on some of those boats, and sent them through weather quite as bad as the fortnight that we’ve had, in six days; and some of them are a little over ten thousand tons, I believe. Now I’ve seen the Majestic, for instance, ducked from her bows to her funnel; and I’ve helped the Arizona,6 I think she was, to back off an iceberg she met with one dark night; and I had to run out of the Paris’s engine-room,7 one day, because there was thirty foot of water in it. Of course, I don’t deny –’ The Steam shut off suddenly, as a tug-boat, loaded with a political club and a brass band, that had been to see a New York Senator off to Europe, crossed their bows, going to Hoboken. There was a long silence that reached, without a break, from the cut-water to the propeller-blades of the Dimbula.

  Then a new, big voice said slowly and thickly, as though the owner had just waked up: ‘It’s my conviction that I have made a fool of myself.’

  The Steam knew what had happened at once; for when a ship finds herself all the talking of the separate pieces ceases and melts into one voice, which is the Soul of the Ship.

  ‘Who are you?’ he said, with a laugh.

  ‘I am the Dimbula, of course. I’ve never been anything else except that – and a fool!’

  The tug-boat, which was doing its very best to be run down, got away just in time, its band playing clashily and brassily a popular but impolite air:

  ‘In the days of old Rameses – are you on?

  In the days of old Rameses – are you on?

  In the days of old Rameses,

  That story had paresis,

  Are you on – are you on – are you on?’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you’ve found yourself,’ said the Steam. ‘To tell the truth, I was a little tired of talking to all those ribs and stringers. Here’s Quarantine. After that we’ll go to our wharf and clean up a little, and – next month we’ll do it all over again.’

  MRS BATHURST

  The day that I chose to visit HMS Peridot in Simon’s Bay1 was the day that the Admiral had chosen to send her up the coast. She was just steaming out to sea as my train came in, and since the rest of the Fleet were either coaling2 or busy at the rifle-ranges a thousand feet up the hill, I found myself stranded, lunchless, on the sea-front with no hope of return to Cape Town before 5 p.m. At this crisis I had the luck to come across my friend Inspector Hooper,3 Cape Government Railways, in command of an engine and a brake-van chalked for repair.

  ‘If you get something to eat,’ he said, ‘I’ll run you down to Glengariff siding till the goods comes along. It’s cooler there than here, you see.’

  I got food and drink from the Greeks who sell all things at a price, and the engine trotted us a couple of miles up the line to a bay of drifted sand and a plank-platform half buried in sand not a hundred yards from the edge of the surf. Moulded dunes, whiter than any snow, rolled far inland up a brown-and-purple valley of splintered rocks and dry scrub. A crowd of Malays hauled at a net beside two blue-and-green boats on the beach; a picnic party danced and shouted barefoot where a tiny river trickled across the flat, and a circle of dry hills, whose feet were set in sands of silver, locked us in against a seven-coloured sea. At either horn of the bay the railway line, cut just above high-water mark, ran round a shoulder of piled rocks, and disappeared.

  ‘You see, there’s always a breeze here,’ said Hooper, opening the door as the engine left us in the siding on the sand, and the strong south-easter buffeting under Elsie’s Peak dusted sand into our tickey beer.4 Presently he sat down to a file full of spiked documen
ts. He had returned from a long trip up-country, where he had been reporting on damaged rolling-stock, as far away as Rhodesia. The weight of the bland wind on my eyelids; the song of it under the car-roof, and high up among the rocks; the drift of fine grains chasing each other musically ashore; the tramp of the surf; the voices of the picnickers; the rustle of Hooper’s file, and the presence of the assured sun, joined with the beer to cast me into magical slumber. The hills of False Bay5 were just dissolving into those of fairyland when I heard footsteps on the sand outside, and the clink of our couplings.

  ‘Stop that!’ snapped Hooper, without raising his head from his work. ‘It’s those dirty little Malay boys, you see: they’re always playing with the trucks …’

  ‘Don’t be hard on ’em. The railway’s a general refuge in Africa,’ I replied.

  ‘’Tis – up-country at any rate. That reminds me,’ – he felt in his waistcoat-pocket – ‘I’ve got a curiosity for you from Wankies6 – beyond Bulawayo. It’s more of a souvenir perhaps than –’

  ‘The old hotel’s inhabited,’ cried a voice. ‘White men, from the language. Marines to the front! Come on, Pritch. Here’s your Belmont.7 Wha – i – i!’

  The last word dragged like a rope as Mr Pyecroft ran round to the open door, and stood looking up into my face. Behind him an enormous Sergeant of Marines trailed a stalk of dried seaweed, and dusted the sand nervously from his fingers.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘I thought the Hierophant was down the coast?’

  ‘We came in last Tuesday – from Tristan d’Acunha – for overhaul, and we shall be in dockyard ’ands for two months, with boiler-seatings.’

  ‘Come and sit down.’ Hooper put away the file.

  ‘This is Mr Hooper of the Railway,’ I explained, as Pyecroft turned to haul up the black-moustached sergeant.

  ‘This is Sergeant Pritchard, of the Agaric, an old shipmate,’ said he. ‘We were strollin’ on the beach.’ The monster blushed and nodded. He filled up one side of the van when he sat down.

  ‘And this is my friend, Mr Pyecroft,’ I added to Hooper, already busy with the extra beer which my prophetic soul had bought from the Greeks.

  ‘Moi aussi,’ quoth Pyecroft, and drew out beneath his coat a labelled quart bottle.8

  ‘Why, it’s Bass!’ cried Hooper.

  ‘It was Pritchard,’ said Pyecroft. ‘They can’t resist him.’

  ‘That’s not so,’ said Pritchard mildly.

  ‘Not verbatim9 per’aps, but the look in the eye came to the same thing.’

  ‘Where was it?’ I demanded.

  ‘Just on beyond here – at Kalk Bay. She was slappin’ a rug in a back veranda. Pritch ’adn’t more than brought his batteries to bear, before she stepped indoors an’ sent it flyin’ over the wall.’

  Pyecroft patted the warm bottle.

  ‘It was all a mistake,’ said Pritchard. ‘I shouldn’t wonder if she mistook me for Maclean. We’re about of a size.’

  I had heard householders of Muizenberg, St James, and Kalk Bay complain of the difficulty of keeping beer or good servants at the seaside, and I began to see the reason. None the less, it was excellent Bass, and I too drank to the health of that large-minded maid.

  ‘It’s the uniform that fetches ’em, an’ they fetch it,’ said Pyecroft. ‘My simple navy blue is respectable, but not fascinatin’. Now Pritch in ’is Number One rig10 is always “purr Mary, on the terrace”11 – ex officio as you might say.’

  ‘She took me for Maclean, I tell you,’ Pritchard insisted. ‘Why – why, – to listen to him you wouldn’t think that only yesterday –’

  ‘Pritch,’ said Pyecroft, ‘be warned in time. If we begin tellin’ what we know about each other we’ll be turned out of the pub. Not to mention aggravated desertion on several occasions –’

  ‘Never anything more than absence without leaf – I defy you to prove it,’ said the Sergeant hotly. ‘An’, if it comes to that, how about Vancouver12 in ’87?’

  ‘How about it? Who pulled bow in the gig going ashore? Who told Boy Niven … ?’

  ‘Surely you were court-martialled for that?’ I said. The story of Boy Niven who lured seven or eight able-bodied seamen and marines into the woods of British Columbia used to be a legend of the Fleet.

  ‘Yes, we were court-martialled to rights,’ said Pritchard, ‘but we should have been tried for murder if Boy Niven ’adn’t been unusually tough. ’E told us e ’ad an uncle ’oo’d give us land to farm. ’E said he was born at the back o’ Vancouver Island, and all the time the beggar was a balmy Barnado Orphan!’

  ‘But we believed him,’ said Pyecroft. ‘I did – you did – Paterson did – an’ ’oo was the Marine that married the coconut-woman afterwards – him with the mouth?’

  ‘Oh, Jones, Spit-Kid Jones. I ’aven’t thought of ’im in years,’ said Pritchard. ‘Yes, Spit-Kid believed it, an’ George Anstey and Moon. We were very young an’ very curious.’

  ‘But lovin’ an’ trustful to a degree,’ said Pyecroft.

  ‘Remember when ’e told us to walk in single file for fear o’ bears? Remember, Pye, when ’e ’opped about in that bog full o’ ferns an’ sniffed an’ said ’e could smell the smoke of ’is uncle’s farm? An’ all the time it was a dirty little outlyin’ uninhabited island. We walked round it in a day, an’ come back to our boat lyin’ on the beach. A whole day Boy Niven kept us walkin’ in circles lookin’ for ’is uncle’s farm! He said ’is uncle was compelled by the law of the land to give us a farm!’

  ‘Don’t get hot, Pritch. We believed,’ said Pyecroft.

  ‘’E’d been readin’ books. ’E only did it to get a run ashore an’ ’ave ’imself talked of. A day an’ a night – eight of us – followin’ Boy Niven round an uninhabited island in the Vancouver archipelago! Then the picket came for us an’ a nice pack o’ idiots we looked!’

  ‘What did you get for it?’ Hooper asked.

  ‘Heavy thunder with continuous lightning for two hours. Thereafter sleet-squalls, a confused sea, and cold, unfriendly weather till conclusion o’ cruise,’ said Pyecroft. ‘It was only what we expected, but what we felt – an’ I assure you, Mr Hooper, even a sailor-man has a heart to break – was bein’ told that we able seamen an’ promisin’ marines ’ad misled Boy Niven. Yes, we poor back-to-the-landers was supposed to ’ave misled him! He rounded on us, o’ course, an’ got off easy.’

  ‘Excep’ for what we gave ’im in the steerin’-flat13 when we came out o’ cells. ’Eard anything of ’im lately, Pye?’

  ‘Signal Boatswain in the Channel Fleet, I believe – Mr L. L. Niven is.’

  ‘An’ Anstey died o’ fever in Benin,’ Pritchard mused. ‘What come to Moon? Spit-Kid we know about.’

  ‘Moon – Moon! Now where did I last … ? Oh yes, when I was in the Palladium. I met Quigley at Buncrana Station. He told me Moon ’ad run when the Astrild sloop was cruising among the South Seas three years back. He always showed signs o’ bein’ a Mormonastic beggar. Yes, he slipped off quietly an’ they ’adn’t time to chase ’im round the islands even if the navigatin’ officer ’ad been equal to the job.’

  ‘Wasn’t he?’ said Hooper.

  ‘Not so. Accordin’ to Quigley the Astrild spent half ’er commission rompin’ up the beach like a she turtle, an’ the other half ’atching turtles’ eggs on the top o’ numerous reefs. When she was docked at Sydney ’er copper looked like Aunt Maria’s washing on the line – an’ her ’midship frames was sprung. The commander swore the dockyard ’ad done it haulin’ the pore thing on to the slips. They do do strange things at sea, Mr Hooper.’

  ‘Ah! I’m not a taxpayer,’ said Hooper, and opened a fresh bottle. The Sergeant seemed to be one who had a difficulty in dropping subjects.

  ‘How it all comes back, don’t it?’ he said. ‘Why, Moon must ’ave ’ad sixteen years’ service before he ran.’

  ‘It takes ’em at all ages. Look at – you know,’ said Pyecroft.

  ‘Who?’ I asked.r />
  ‘A Service man within eighteen months of his pension14 is the party you’re thinkin’ of,’ said Pritchard. ‘A warrant ’oo’s name begins with a V., isn’t it?’

  ‘But, in a way o’ puttin’ it, we can’t say that he actually did desert,’ Pyecroft suggested.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Pritchard. ‘It was only permanent absence up-country without leaf. That was all.’

  ‘Up-country?’ said Hooper. ‘Did they circulate his description?’

  ‘What for?’ said Pritchard, most impolitely.

  ‘Because deserters are like columns in the war. They don’t move away from the line, you see. I’ve known a chap caught at Salisbury15 that way tryin’ to get to Nyassa. They tell me, but o’course I don’t know, that they don’t ask questions on the Nyassa Lake Flotilla up there. I’ve heard of a P. & O. quartermaster in full command of an armed launch there.’

  ‘Do you think Click ’ud ha’ gone up that way?’ Pritchard asked.

  ‘There’s no saying. He was sent up to Bloemfontein to take over some Navy ammunition left in the fort. We know he took it over and saw it into the trucks. Then there was no more Click – then or thereafter. Four months ago it transpired, and thus the casus belli16 stands at present,’ said Pyecroft.

  ‘What were his marks?’ said Hooper again.

  ‘Does the Railway get a reward for returnin’ ’em, then?’ said Pritchard.

  ‘If I did d’you suppose I’d talk about it?’ Hooper retorted angrily.

  ‘You seemed so very interested,’ said Pritchard with equal crispness.

  ‘Why was he called Click?’ I asked, to tide over an uneasy little break in the conversation. The two men were staring at each other very fixedly.

  ‘Because of an ammunition hoist carryin’ away,’ said Pyecroft. ‘And it carried away four of ’is teeth – on the lower port side, wasn’t it, Pritch? The substitutes which ’e bought weren’t screwed home, in a manner o’ sayin’. When he talked fast they used to lift a little on the bed-plate. ’Ence, “Click.” They called ’im a superior man, which is what we’d call a long, black-’aired, genteelly-speakin’, ’alf-bred beggar on the lower deck.’